This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

Tx Trib Schools Explorer

Saturday, March 02, 2013

Important read. "The Obama administration
has allowed these unaccountable forces unprecedented access to federal
levers of power. It was the Broad Foundation's consultants, along with
the Walton Family and Gates and others, who actually wrote Race To The
Top's voluminous guidelines, as well as many of the state level
proposals that won the lion's share of funds under the program. "

"Essentially we have
allowed privatizers, and not for profit bodies funded directly and
indirectly by the privatizers to embed themselves in, to actually become
the “authorities” which “certify” our school sysems."

-Angela

Why Does the US Chamber of Commerce Want to Train or Replace Your Elected School Board, If They Haven't Already?

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

A key role in the elite drive to privatize public education is being played by privately owned school “accreditation” agencies, which are immune from public scrutiny, and under the absolute thrall of pro-privatization forces like the US Chamber of Commerce and the Broad Foundation. Are you hearing stories in local corporate media about your school board being “dysfunctional” and your school systems accreditation threatened? It could mean the US Chamber of Commerce and the Broad Foundation just want to replace them.

Why Does the US Chamber of Commerce Want to Train or Replace Your Elected School Board, If They Haven't Already?

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

There's a not-so-secret campaign underway to privatize public education, an effort that is making unprecedented progress under the administration of Barack Obama. How is such a thing possible? Public education is supposedly a matter of local government, in the hands of thousands of school boards across the country, most of them chosen by local voters?

The representatives of corporations, billionaires, Wall Street speculators, along with their right wing foundations and political tentacles like the US Chamber of Commerce, all of whom aim to privatize education have been allowed to embed themselves in the supposedly impartial processes which evaluate and accredit schools and school systems. From these completely unaccountable positions, they are able to create convenient “crises” at will by making spurious and anonymous accusations against elected local school board members, and threatening to withdraw the accreditation of individual schools and entire districts. When such threats are made, a mayor or governor can appoint extra school board members or as in Georgia this week, replace school board members the voters have chosen with his own pro-privatization flunkies. Keep reading here.